There are several ways to find messages in Emacs. From the summary
buffer, you can use / o (gnus-summary-insert-old-articles) to display
all or some old messages. You can then scan through the headers in the
summary buffer by using C-s (isearch-forward), or you can limit the
displayed messages with these commands:

Messages from a given author

/ a

gnus-summary-limit-to-author

Messages whose subjects matching a given regular expression

/ /

gnus-summary-limit-to-subject

Messages that match a given extra header

/ x

gnus-summary-limit-to-extra-headers

Messages at least N days old

/ t

gnus-summary-limit-to-age

Limits work on the messages that are currently displayed, so you can
apply multiple limits. If you make a mistake, use / w
(gnus-summary-pop-limit) to remove the previous limit. You can repeat
/ w (gnus-summary-pop-limit) until satisfied. To remove all the
limits, type C-u / w (gnus-summary-popl-limit).

If you specify a prefix, the limit’s meaning is reversed. For
example, C-u / a (gnus-summary-limit-to-author) will remove the
messages from the matching author or authors.

You can use Gnus to search the currently-displayed messages by using
M-s (gnus-summary-search-article-forward) and M-r
(gnus-summary-search-article-backward).

If you want to search a lot of mail, you’ll find NNIR handy. NNIR is a
front-end to mail search engines which can index your mail and return
search results quickly. If you want to use NNIR with a local or remote
IMAP server, you will need to use nnir.el and imap.el. If you download
your mail using fetchmail or connect to a POP3 server and use an nnml
backend, you can use NNIR with a search engine such as swish-e to
search your ~/Mail directory efficiently.

1.6.7.1 Setting up IMAP and NNIR

If you use IMAP, then your mail is stored on the mail server and
you’ll need to use the IMAP search interface to search through
it. Download nnir.el fromhttp://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/download/nnir.el and save it to
your ~/elisp directory. You will also need an imap.el that is newer
than the one that comes with Emacs 22. Download imap.el fromhttp://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/download/imap.el and save it to
your ~/elisp directory as well. Because Gnus comes with an older
version of imap.el, you will need to make sure that the new version of
imap.el is loaded. Add the following to your ~/.gnus:

Restart your Emacs. You can check if the correct version of imap.el
has been loaded by typing M-x locate-library and specifying
imap.el. If Emacs reports “~/elisp/imap.el”, then Gnus is configured
to use the updated imap.el.

1.6.7.2 Setting up POP3 and NNIR

If you use the configuration for POP3 that is suggested in this
chapter, then your mail is stored in the nnml backend, which uses one
file per message. To search this using NNIR, to install nnir.el and an
external search mail engine. The Namazu search engine runs on Linux,
UNIX, and Microsoft Windows, so that’s what we’ll talk about here. To
find and configure other mail search engines supported by NNIR, check
out the comments in nnir.el.

First, you’ll need to download and install Namazu. If Namazu is
available as a package for your distribution, install it that way, as
it depends on a number of other programs. An installer for Microsoft
Windows can be found at http://www.namazu.org/windows/ . If you need
to build Namazu from source, you can get the source code and instructions
from http://www.namazu.org .

After you’ve installed Namazu, create a directory for Namazu’s index
files, such as ~/.namazu-mail. Then index your mail by typing this at
the command-line:

If
matching messages are found, then you will see a temporary group with
the results. Although you can’t delete messages from this view,
reading and replying to these messages is the same as reading and
replying to regular messages.

To see a message in its original context, type G T
(gnus-summary-nnir-goto-thread) from the summary buffer. This opens
the message’s original group. If Gnus asks you how many articles to
load, press RET to accept the default of all the articles.

If you have many contacts in another address book program, you can import them into BBDB. Two popular formats are comma-separated value files (CSV) and vCard files (VCF).

Project XXX: Import a CSV File into BBDB

To import a CSV file into BBDB, you will need csv.el from http://ulf.epplejasper.de/downloads/csv.el and lookout.el from http://ulf.epplejasper.de/downloads/lookout.el . Save both files to your ~/elisp directory. Make sure that your ~/elisp directory is in your load-path by adding the following line to your ~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp")

Export your contacts as an Outlook-style CSV file, then open the file in Emacs. After loading the following code, call M-x wicked/bbdb-import-csv-buffer to merge the CSV data into your address book. Emacs will try to update existing records based on the e-mail address or name provided, creating new records if necessary. After Emacs updates the records, the relevant records are displayed in the *BBDB* buffer. Here is the code to make that work:

Project xxx: Import a vCard File into BBDB

To import a vCard file (VCF) into BBDB, you will need vcard.el from http://www.splode.com/~friedman/software/emacs-lisp/src/vcard.el and bbdb-vcard-import.el from http://www-pu.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de/users/crestani/downloads/bbdb-vcard-import.el . By default, these files allow you to import names and e-mail addresses from vCard files exported from various address book programs. Save vcard.el and bbdb-vcard-import.el to your ~/elisp directory and add the following lines to your ~/.emacs:

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/elisp")
(require 'bbdb-vcard-import)

Back up your ~/.bbdb file before calling M-x bbdb-vcard-import to import a file or M-x bbdb-vcard-import-buffer to import the current buffer. WARNING: If your vCard file includes fields with multiline values, you may get silent errors. Verify your import by browsing through the displayed entries. If some of them have been misread, revert to your backup ~/.bbdb by closing Emacs and copying your backup over the ~/.bbdb file. To fix the multi-line error, include the following lines in your ~/.emacs:

Because address book programs don’t use standard labels for addresses and phone numbers, bbdb-vcard-import.el ignores those fields. For example, Gmail uses the generic field “Label” for address information and does not use separate fields for city, state, zip code, and country. While bbdb-snarf.el makes an attempt to extract addresses from plain text, it seems to be less trouble to export to the Outlook CSV format instead, or even to type the address in yourself. If you want to import addresses, see Project XXX: Import a CSV File into BBDB.

Here’s a partial workaround to enable you to import phone numbers. I tested this code with vCard files from Gmail and LinkedIn. To try it out, add the following modifications to your ~/.emacs:

Creating Records

Creating a record in BBDB is not like creating a record in graphical address book programs. You will be prompted for each field through the minibuffer, one field at a time. Don’t worry about making mistakes while entering data, as you can always edit the records afterwards.

To create a record, use the command M-x bbdb-create. Here are the prompts you’ll encounter:

Street address, more lines – press RET to indicate the end of the street address

City

Acme City

State

Abbreviations are okay. Consistency helps.

AC

Country

Acme Country

Phone Location

Short identifier for phone number (Home, Office, etc.) – tab completion available. Leave blank if you have no phone information, or if you are done.

Home

Phone

Phone number. I tend to specify the full number, using spaces to break it into readable chunks.

+1 111 111 1111 x1111

Additional Comments

Notes about the person, such as interests, how you met, and so on

Likes rockets

Press RET to skip any fields for which you don’t have information. To
cancel the entry process, type C-g (keyboard-quit).

After you create the record, Emacs will display the record in another
window. You can then switch to the record and edit it. See Project XXX: Edit a BBDB record.

Searching Records

To search for a specific record, type M-x bbdb, or press b
(bbdb) while in the BBDB buffer. This prompts for a regular
expression and searches the name, company, network address, and notes
fields of all the records for a match against the regular expression
supplied. M-x bbdb-name, M-x bbdb-company, M-x bbdb-net, M-x
bbdb-notes, and M-x bbdb-phones search the corresponding fields only.

Updating Records

After creating or searching for a record, you can switch to the BBDB
window to edit it. Press C-o (bbdb-insert-field) to insert
custom fields. You can use tab completion on existing field names, and
you can also define your own fields by typing any field name. For
example, you may want to store people’s job titles in a field called
“job”.

To edit the value of a field, move your cursor to the field and presse (bbdb-edit-current-field) to change the value. To delete
a field, move your cursor to the field and press C-k
(bbdb-delete-current-field-or-record).

Deleting Records

To delete an entire record, move the text cursor to the name and press C-k (bbdb-delete-current-field-or-record). You will be prompted for confirmation. Be careful! If you mistakenly delete a record, there’s no easy way to get it back. Fortunately, BBDB stores its data in a plain text file (~/.bbdb). Back up that file regularly and you’ll be able to recover from mistakes. You can also set up automatic file backups in Emacs (see Project XXX: Make Automatic Backups).

Now you know how to work with individual records. How can you import your address book information from other programs?

The main address book and contact management module for Emacs is the Insidious Big Brother Database (BBDB), which can be integrated into several mail clients and other modules within Emacs. If you use BBDB to keep track of contact information, you’ll be able to look up phone numbers or add notes to people’s records from your Emacs-based mail. Even if you don’t do e-mail within Emacs, you’ll find that BBDB’s customizability makes it surprisingly powerful.

In this project, you will learn how to set up BBDB as a basic address book. The BBDB homepage is at http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/. The development version fixes a number of bugs, so I recommend you try it instead of the stable version. However, if you are on Microsoft Windows or you do not have development tools handy, you might find the stable version easier to install. As of this writing, the stable version (2.35) can be downloaded from http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/bbdb-2.35.tar.gz . Download and unpack it to ~/elisp/bbdb-2.35, and save the pre-built bbdb-autoloads.el from http://bbdb.sourceforge.net/bbdb-autoloads.el into ~/elisp/bbdb-2.35/lisp .

To check out the development version, change to your ~/elisp directory and type in the following lines at the command prompt:

Use either ~/elisp/bbdb-2.35/lisp(1) or ~/elisp/bbdb/lisp(2) depending on the location of the installed BBDB Lisp files. Then load BBDB(3) and configure it for the Gnus mail client and the Message mode used to compose mail(4). It’s also a good idea to configure BBDB to accept any kind of phone number(5), not just North American numbers with a particular syntax.

After you evaluate this code or restart Emacs, BBDB should be part of your system. Next step: enter your address book!

Update 2014-05-13: The original code is for BBDB version 2. Thomas Morgan sent this update which makes it work with BBDB version 3 – see below.

I like starting my e-mail with a short salutation such as “Hello, Mike!”, “Hello, Michael”, or “Hello, Mikong!”, but it can be hard to remember which nicknames people prefer to use, and calling someone by the wrong name is a bit of a faux pas. Sometimes people sign e-mail with their preferred name, but what if you haven’t sent e-mail to or received e-mail from someone in a while? In this project, you’ll learn how to set up my BBDB to remember people’s nicknames for you using a custom “nick” field, and to use those nicknames when replying to messages in Gnus or composing messages from my BBDB.

The nickname code worked so well that I started thinking of what else I could customize. It was easy to go from nicknames to personalized salutations. This hack started because one of my friends is from Romania, so I thought I’d greet her in Romanian with “Salut, Letitia!” instead of just “Hello, Letitia!”. The code in this project uses a “hello” field to store these salutations in your BBDB.

To set up personalized nicknames and salutations, add the following code to your ~/.emacs:

After you add this code, you can store personalized nicknames and salutations in your BBDB. Nicknames and salutations will be looked up using people’s e-mail addresses. While in the *BBDB* buffer, you can type C-o (bbdb-insert-new-field) to add a field to the current record. Add a nick field with the person’s nickname, or a hello field with a custom salutation. When you compose a message to or reply to a message from that person, the salutation or nickname will be included. If no nickname can be found, the recipient’s name will be used instead.

A number of variables can be used to modify the behavior of this code(1). For example, you may or may not want to greet 20 people individually. The default value of wicked/gnus-nick-threshold is to greet up to four people individually, and greet more people collectively. If you always want to greet people individually, add (setq wicked/gnus-nick-threshold nil) to your ~/.emacs. If you want to change the strings used to greet people individually or collectively, change wicked/bbdb-hello-string and wicked/bbdb-hello-all-string. If you want to store the data into different fields, change wicked/bbdb-nick-field and wicked/bbdb-salutation-field, but note that old data will not be automatically copied to the new fields.

Here’s how the code works. First, it retrieves the list of addresses from the header(2). If there are more addresses than wicked/gnus-nick-threshold, then wicked/bbdb-hello-all-string is used to greet everyone. If not, each recipient address is looked up. If the recipient cannot be found in your BBDB, then the recipient’s name or e-mail address is used(4). If there is a personalized salutation, it is used(5). If there is a nickname, it is used(6). If the person has a record but neither salutation or nickname, then the name of the record is used(7). After all recipients have been processed, the names are added to the message(8), followed by the salutations(9). This function is added to the different Gnus message-posting functions, so it should be called whenever you compose or reply to messages.

Now that I have an idea of what a good Wicked Cool Emacs book chapter looks like, I find it much easier to write and edit chapters. I’ve just finished revising my first three chapters based on my editor’s feedback, and they will be finding their way to my technical reviewer soon. Bursty productivity indeed.